ABSTRACT
The UK’s engagement with the whole issue of climate change has been rather paradoxical. On the one hand it is widely regarded as a global leader, both in terms of its international diplomatic efforts to raise the profi le of climate change and its domestic emission reduction performance (Darkin 2006; IEEP 2006). Domestically, it is one of only a handful of EU-15 Member States to have reduced emissions to below Kyoto target levels already by 2009 (EEA 2009).1 To help achieve this, it has deployed a new generation of policy instruments (Jordan et al. 2003), such as emissions trading. Internationally, the UK has shown entrepreneurial leadership, principally during the Rio and Kyoto climate summits and as chair of the G8 and President of the EU. The authoritative Stern review of the economics of climate change (Stern 2006) can be regarded as a prominent example of cognitive leadership, as can decades of pioneering research at centres including the Meteorological Offi ce and the University of East Anglia (UEA). In 2008, the UK was widely acclaimed as the fi rst country to enshrine in law carbon emission reduction targets – of up to 80 per cent by 2050 – with a view to removing climate change from the vagaries of the ‘issue attention cycle’ (Jordan and Lorenzoni 2007). On the other hand, the UK’s substantive record in terms of emission reductions is patchy at best. To a large extent, the reductions achieved during the 1990s were a fortuitous by-product of unrelated policy reforms in the energy sector (RCEP 2000; Kerr 2007). In the 2000s, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions started to rise again, and the unilateral 1997 commitment to reduce such emissions by 20 per cent by 2010 was quietly dropped (DEFRA 2008). Moreover, it is questionable whether any politician in the UK – outside, perhaps, the Green Party – has really grasped the sheer size of the challenge of decarbonising the national energy system in just over one generation, widely regarded as necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. In this chapter we outline the history of the UK’s response to climate change, investigating the origins of the UK’s position and the tensions it has in turn created within government and between government and society. We note the waxing and waning of leadership in the face of key constraints such
as opposition from key stakeholders, economic pressures and the vicissitudes of the ‘issue attention cycle’. The overall story is one of repeated attempts by governments of both right and left to ‘join-up’ government to deliver deeper emission cuts and a rather piecemeal approach to the introduction of new policy instruments. At key moments, governments have caved in to pressure from interest groups or the wider public. In other words, the ability of governments to lead a low-carbon transition has been rather more fi tful and halting than the UK’s international reputation would suggest.
